New material light, fantastic

A NEW material so light it can sit atop a fluffy dandelion has been invented. Styrofoam is 100 times heavier than the new material, which the research team, comprising scientists at UC Irvine, HRL Laboratories and Caltech, say in the peer-reviewed November 18 issue of Science is the lightest material on earth.

The material, called ''ultralight metallic microlattice'', consists of 99.99 per cent air, thanks to its ''microlattice'' cellular architecture.

''The trick is to fabricate a lattice of interconnected hollow tubes with a wall thickness 1000 times thinner than a human hair,'' lead author Tobias Shandler of HRL said.

It is made out of 90 per cent nickel, but Bill Carter, manager of the Architected Materials Group at HRL, said it could be made out of other materials.

Its uses are still to be determined. Lorenzo Valdevit, UCI's principal investigator on the project, brought up impact protection, uses in the aerospace industry, acoustic dampening and maybe some battery applications.

Mr Carter was asked what would happen if someone threw this material in the air and waited for it to fall to the ground.

''It's sort of like a feather - it floats down, and its terminal velocity depends on the density,'' he said. ''It takes more than 10 seconds, for instance, for the lightest material we've made to fall if you drop it from shoulder height.''